Best Of

@primesuspect said:
Tell me this, what could a homebrewer who uses a packaged mix do (besides adding different additives/ingredients) to differentiate their product from the guy down the street who uses the same mix?

One thing that I think is being lost in this discussion is that there's a step in between beer-in-a-can mix and all-grain. That's an extract-with-steeping-grains recipe. You use malt extract as your base, but then steep specialty grains and add your own hops. That's what I advocate @oni_dels‌ try before jumping into all grain.

As for what you can different, since you make changing ingredients off limits then it doesn't matter much whether you're doing all-grain or not. With both you can change fermentation temperature and choose how fruity/clean it is. With all-grain the main difference is that you can also affect how much body is in the final beer. If you're doing extract you can mimic that by adding malto-dextrine (but you're adding a different ingredient).

So what is the advantage of all-grain? You can use a wider variety of base malts. Don't want 2 row? Use Marris Otter or Vienna or Munich. There are some extracts available for these but you have a lot more to choose from with all-grain. Also you recover the cost of your equipment after about 20 batches.

tl;dr: it's not about beer-in-a-can vs all-grain, there's an in-between step of building recipes with extracts as the main fermentable and that's where you start to understand what tools you have to make the beer you want.

@primesuspect said:
Tell me this, what could a homebrewer who uses a packaged mix do (besides adding different additives/ingredients) to differentiate their product from the guy down the street who uses the same mix?

Alter or augment the recipe.

To be devil's advocate advocate advocate I would argue that yes, farming your own beef DOES give you the ultimate control and that ultimately, it definitely could result in an even more amazing burger, because you raise the cow for the characteristics you want. There are indeed chefs that do this, or at the bare minimum dictate to a boutique farmer what exactly they want. You want beef that is raised at a specific altitude that eats a specific grass and is treated a specific way, then slaughtered and processed in a specific way and aged in a specific way with blocks of a specific sea salt in the aging room at a certain temperature, etc. All of these things actually happen and they do result in noticeably superior end product. It happens with coffee, it happens with beef, it happens with beer. I'm not suggesting that a homebrewer needs to go this route, but I'm simply saying that an argument can be made that making things from somebody else's packaged goods could result in a more generic and homogenous end product.

Tell me this, what could a homebrewer who uses a packaged mix do (besides adding different additives/ingredients) to differentiate their product from the guy down the street who uses the same mix?

@ardichoke said:
Damnit.... now I REALLY want to get the meat grinding attachment for our KitchenAid so that I can make sausage in addition to the bacon I've been curing. CURSE YOU ICRONTIC!

I picked one up last week